Course Taxonomy: Enterprise & Product Agility

Microservices Engineering Boot Camp

Part 1: Intro to Microservices

  1. Optimize for speed, not efficiency
  2. Case Study: General Electric
    1. Throughput
    2. Waste
  3. Amazon Web Services Case Study (SOA/Microservices)
    1. Problem: Scaling the Organization and the ‘Big ball of mud’
    2. Conway’s Law
    3. Service Oriented Architecture
    4. Forced Self Service Mandate
    5. Result: Amazon dominance of cloud
    6. Result: High velocity at scale
  4. Intro to Containers (encapsulation)
    1. What is Docker
    2. Exercise: Install Docker
    3. Exercise: Docker Hello World
    4. Docker ecosystem
    5. Docker concepts
    6. Container encapsulation/ideal use cases
      1. Encapsulation
      2. Speed
      3. Increased utilization of computing resources
    7. Benefits
      1. Configure once, run everywhere
    8. VM’s vs Container use cases
      1. Databases & stateless workloads
    9. Docker Architecture
    10. Exercise: Docker 101 – Web App
    11. Docker File System
    12. Docker Images
    13. Exercise: Stateless Web App
    14. Local Registry
    15. Data Volumes
    16. Exercise: Docker 201 – Compose Multi-tier app
    17. Continuous integration patterns
    18. Docker Security
    19. Continuous Integration
      1. Canary Release
      2. Blue Green Deployment
      3. A/B Testing
      4. Rolling Update
      5. Jenkins Plugin
  5. Microservice challenge: Continuous Integration Service
    1. On-Premise
      1. Jenkins
    2. SaaS Service
      1. Shippable
      2. Jenkins
      3. TravisCI
    3. Exercise: Trigger build/tests from change

Part 2: Microservices in Development

  1. Uber Case Study
    1. 2000 services, 1000 engineers
    2. Tradeoffs
      1. Plus – overall development speed
      2. Cons – technical challenges
  2. Box Case Study
    1. Traditional service deployment with bare metal
    2. 10x faster workflow with DevOps practices
  3. Microservice challenge: Image repository
    1. Docker repository development instance
    2. On-Premise Service
      1. Quay by CoreOS
    3. SaaS solution
      1. Docker Hub
      2. JFrog
    4. Exercise: Submit image to service
    5. Exercise: Pull image from service
  4. Intro to Kubernetes (Containers at Google)
    1. Prerequisites
    2. Containers
    3. Linux Kernel Features
    4. Container User Experience
    5. New Container Capabilities
    6. Gaps using Containers in Production
  5. Exercise: Kubernetes 100: Hello World
  6. Core Concepts
    1. Cluster Orchestration
    2. Originated at Google
    3. Open Source
    4. Benefits
    5. Design Principles
  7. Architecture
    1. Master/Node
    2. Kubectl
    3. Replication Controller
    4. Kubelet
    5. Kube-Proxy
    6. Persistent Volumes
    7. Etcd
    8. High Availability
    9. Exercise: Kubernetes 101: Stateless web app
  8. Kubernetes Features
    1. Pods
    2. Labels
    3. Services
    4. Namespaces
    5. Resource Quota
  9. Exercise: Kubernetes 201: Guestbook app

Part 3: Microservices in Production

  1. Spotify Case Study
    1. 810 Services, 477 engineers
  2. Microservice challenge: Service discovery
    1. Skydns
    2. Consul
  3. Exercise: Resolve service with DNS
  4. Security
    1. Goals
    2. Roles
    3. Attribute Based Access Control
    4. Policies
    5. Service Accounts
    6. Secrets
  5. Forth Microservice challenge: Secrets
    1. Vault
    2. Kubernetes Secrets API
  6. Exercise: Kubernetes – Store database credentials in cluster
  7. Cluster Add-ons
    1. Cluster DNS
    2. Logging with Elasticsearch and Fluentd
    3. Container Level Monitoring
    4. cAdvisor
    5. InfluxDB
    6. Prometheus
  8. Exercise: WordPress on Kubernetes
  9. Managing state with disposable architectures
    1. Tradeoffs, standalone vs containerized databases
    2. CAP Theorem
    3. SQL Databases
    4. NOSQL Databases
  10. Exercise: Cassandra on Kubernetes
  11. Practicing Failure
    1. Optimize MTTR
  12. Netflix Case Study
    1. Simian Army
    2. Graceful handling of failure

Part 4: Putting it all together

  1. Why Microservices?
    1. Scale an organization
    2. Tradeoffs
    3. Fault Tolerance
    4. Throughput
    5. Waste
  2. Kubernetes Alpha Features
    1. Multi-Datacenter Control Plane
    2. RBAC/Multi-tenancy
  3. Openshift/Mesos/Other PaaS platforms
  4. Exercise: Customize Microservice App
  5. Exercise: Scale app for simulated demand
  6. Review of Microservice Challenges
    1. Secure Images
    2. Highly available application
    3. Secrets
    4. Continuous Integration
    5. DNS Name resolution
  7. Summary

Using Jira Align to Implement SAFe

Section 1: Introduction to Jira Align for SAFe Organizations

The opening section will set the groundwork for SAFe and Jira Aligns support of the framework. 

Section 2: Portfolio Management

In this section we will review LPM concepts and practices from the perspective of Agile Portfolio Operations and Lean Governance as described by SAFe. Starting with a demonstration of Strategy & Investment Funding, we will look at how strategic goals and their alignment to Strategic Themes help the APMO/LACe and train leaders make decisions.

The participants will then complete the following guided exercises to understand Lean Portfolio Management concepts and how Jira Align supports each.

  • Create Portfolio Epics and associate them to (pre-created) Themes
    • Allocate portioned theme budgets to Portfolio Epics.
  • Manage Intake using the Portfolio Kanban Board
    • Students will move their Epic through the Portfolio Kanban, ensuring exit criteria Is met
  • Use the backlog to prioritize and rank Portfolio Epics – pulling rank from Themes and modifying the ranking of the Epics In the UI
  • 'Create' Roadmaps
    • Calendar View -aka 'planning view'
      • View Planned & Unplanned work, modify the views
      • Students will adjust epics and sync to the backlog
    • PI View – aka "health & reporting view' Students will
      • Update Health
      • Add Milestones
      • View by Product
      • Briefings views by customer

Section 3: Program/ART Management

In this section, we will cover the 'heart' of SAFe. Connecting strategy to execution begins with prioritized set of portfolio epics, from there our architects and product managers create the execution plans. Participants will:

  • Decompose Portfolio Epics Into Features
  • Use backlog to rank Features (Jira Epics) Pulling rank from Epics –
    • Align features to Jira Projects for the train.
    • Watch as the feature syncs to Jira
  • Backlog Management
    • Ranking – Pull rank from the Epics, Prioritize the backlog and push the new rank to Jira
    • Orphan objects – using the orphan functionality to ensure all work is estimated and aligned to a parent
    • Estimation
    • Kanban column view – pull top features – to get to "close velocity"

Section 4: PI Simulations

  • Prepare for & conduct MOCK PI Planning
    • Select top 10 most Important features (pre-defined list)
    • Program Board – Pre PI Load by PM/RTE role
  • Integration to /from Jira
    • The proper set up of Jira for SAFe
      • Class participants will be able to see stories from Jira Align, write to Jira
      • Class participants creating Feature (Jira Epics) or Stories in Jira
      • Dependencies – 2 per team
      • Risks – 1 per team
      • Objectives
        • Associate 1 to OKR (pre-existing)
        • Program Board View
        • Program Room
      • Monitor PI Progress using the Program Board
        • Show program board In flight – how to resolve problems

Section 5: Report on progress throughout the PI and across the portfolio

  • Work Tree
  • WIP
  • PIP
  • Scope Change
  • Risk report
  • Objective Report/tree
  • PI Progress Report
  • PI Clean up Report
  • Roadmaps
  • INv V Actuals
  • Investment Theme
  • OKR
  • Work Tree Strategy View